The car was designed when Mercedes co-operated with Tesla, so BMS and drive unit should be already well supported. Additionally Smart ED might be very similar to this one.

Is there anyone who have done some experiments with this car? What would be the easiest way to verify that the CAN bus is available in the OBD connector (before buying OVMS)? Generic adapters do not report anything from the car..

The monitor-all command on a generic OBDII device should show something if there is data on the CAN bus. Other than advanced diagnostic tools, or OVMS, that is the simplest. But you may need to play around with bitrates to find a match (start at 500k and work down).

Another option is finding a service manual, or wiring diagram for the car. Those should have the connector pinouts.

Monitor-all command seems useful - when searching from web it's sometimes hard to figure out what to search - there is too much info with OBD. In this case MA -command was just what I needed for initial verification.

Tomorrow I should have some time to sit in the car and hopefully get it connected to ELM327-device. Then I can start the true journey to get a rid of the unreliable MB cloud!

The ELM327 testing did what it was supposed to do - verify that there is something live. Capturing is too slow with the Carista adapter, so decoding anything become difficult. So I ordered OVMS (from fasttech), as it's was the end target anyways, and it supports CAN capture out of box. It should arrive in 1-3 weeks.

If anyone who has started or completed a new vehicle module for OVMS reads this post, it would be nice to hear any comments :) How succeeded or why failed?

P.S. One important difference between any ELM327 and OVMS is Wifi - I can stay inside the house when testing and developing :)

OVMS arrived some time ago, but I was lazy to start the project. Now it got warm enough to sit in the car until I got the device up and running. Now even the AP mode is accesible from the house (if I am sitting right next to window). Decoding messages is more difficult than I expected - the car goes to sleep after a while. With no prior experience on the unit it's hard to see the difference between sleeping car and bad config in OVMS. Another problem is that I do not drive now much, due to the virus, so the battery is mostly full.

The first messages that I have managed to decode, partially, are:

+12V voltage, 0x205, byte 1, scaling 100mV

Range, or full range, 0x34F, byte 7, scaling 1 km

Also one message from SmartED (http://ed.no-limit.de/wiki/index.php/Hauptseite) seemed feasible. 0x3F2 Could be eco results.

From Smart codebase I found also some hints on how to wake up the bus. I have not yet tried them - commandin the car is a little bit scary thing to do when you have no knowledge nor documentation :)

If there is anyone out there with knowledge on the B250e's can, it would be nice to hear about you :)

Mark,

any recommendations on documenting the reverse engineered metrics? Initially they'll be a inaccurate, but over time it could become usefull data..
And thank you for putting so much effort in to the project :)

> any recommendations on documenting the reverse engineered metrics? Initially they'll be a inaccurate, but over time it could become usefull data..

For activate data (not polled, but generally trasmitted as a broadcast on the CAN bus), I suggest DBC file format. SavvyCAN supports that, and has a GUI editor to maintain the files. It is not particularly easy to get started with, but is a standard that can be processed by automated tools. In particular, you can replay a capture file against a DBC file, and see the metrics.

I haven't seen any good solution for polled (PID) data. Still looking, but concentrating on support for DBC first.

Just a status update in the hopes someone with B250E would read this :)

Listening on the diagnostic CAN (the one found in OBD -connector). Unfortunately Battery SOC is not visible there and I also failed to start the preheat from there.

My next step is to hook OVMS to telemetry CAN. That's the CAN that is connected to Mercedes Me COM-module. If that works better, then it's pretty ideal solution (for me at least) as there is a lot of space behind the glove box to do a proper and permanen installation for OVMS module.

If anyone with Mercedes specific experience reads this, it would be cool to have help on controlling the car via OBD -connector.